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I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Friday, October 09, 2015

All For One? But One Veto For All?

America is the last hope of the West to have a fully capable national military force capable of defending the West.

CBC News has learned that a Canadian military effort to formally create integrated forces with the United States for expeditionary operations included an even more ambitious option — a plan to fully integrate military forces, explored during a meeting with the top generals from the two countries.

The Canadian military efforts were ultimately shut down and refocused on improving interoperability between the forces.

The discussion looked at increased interoperability at the low end, full integration of Canadian forces into the US military at the high end, and selected integration in between.

This makes sense for a small military which can't afford to create all the capabilities that a modern force needs to fight effectively on such a small scale. We certainly don't build our state National Guards as tiny full spectrum militaries, after all.

And as the article notes, we have integrated our air defenses for continental defense.

So while I understand why the Canadians rejected full integration--lack of sovereignty by making their entire military part of ours--it is not a wild-eyed notion.

(Although isn't membership in NATO supposed to take care of the interoperability issue already?)

Those are just the ones that come to mind. I imagine there are more examples.

And the Europeans are doing even more to cope with the inefficiencies of scale by trying to dole out capabilities to European states (the "framework" plan).

The problem with this plan is that as an excuse for everyone to reduce their land forces, you get the worst of an imperial army without the benefits.

With everyone contributing a little to a larger ground force (or navy or air force), nobody has a fully capable full-spectrum military. So to deploy the multi-national integrated army you need consensus to order it into battle.

To be effective, you'd need a strong central EU state to order it to war. And you'd need a strong central EU state to forge a common language and organization for the component parts to work together (interoperability).

So the Canadian exploration of plugging their small military into America's existing full-spectrum force actually makes far more sense than the European approach.

So, how do we react [to the reduction of European armies]? Could we convince our European allies to simply abandon their militaries above the brigade or squadron level and ask them to organize and equip ground battalions and brigades that plug into our brigades and divisions, with our higher level units taking care of logistics and command? Could the Europeans send squadrons to fight as part of our air wings, which we move and support logistically? And plug individual ships into our task forces that we supply on the move?

Of course, for the same reason that the Framework plan can't work, simply subordinating European units to American forces wouldn't work. Nobody will give up their sovereign military power. After all, when you think of going out-of-area this type of integration makes sense for Europeans to avoid the expense of building a small power projection capability that we already have for entire armies, air forces, and fleets to move and fight globally.

But for the defense of Europe, would Europeans really make their ability to defend their continents reliant on an American decision to deploy significant ground forces to Europe that the European dribs and drabs could be plugged into? I rather doubt it.

But the Europeans are all reducing their armies to dangerous levels. The Turks have a large army capable of fighting. But the Germans, British, French, and Italians seem to be incapable of fielding a fully capable army able to fight a major ground war.

The Poles are making real efforts. But their army is pretty small, too. It may be able to fight on its own. But it can't fight on its own for long.

When you look at it, the middle course that the Canadians pondered makes sense for them far more than it makes sense for European nations. Is Canada ever going to send their military abroad to fight if it isn't with America? And would Canada ever have to fight a war on their own soil without our help?

Canada and other small nations should be encouraged to contribute battalions that can be plugged into our brigade combat teams if these allies wish to contribute to an out-of area mission.

If our Army shrinks to 420,000 active duty troops, this foreign help could expand a new round-out program that looks like our Army National Guard could not fully staff, that I suggested.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.